Shell and BP alone eclipse renewable energy sector on access to ministers

Fossil fuel companies enjoy far greater access to UK government ministers than renewable energy companies or climate campaigns, an analysis by the Guardian has revealed.

Shell, the fossil fuel multi-national, has had at least 112 meetings with ministers since the last general election, and its rival, BP, at least 79 meetings. But this outweighs the number of meetings that ministers granted to renewable energy companies.

Twenty-three leading companies and two trade organisations in the renewable sector were given a combined total of 119 meetings with ministers over the same period.

The analysis found at least 230 meetings with Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, Total, ConocoPhillips, Chevron and the trade organisation Oil & Gas UK during the same time.

Caroline Lucas, Green Party MP in the last parliament, criticised the coalition for giving priority to the fossil fuel giants. “Time and again the government has shown itself to be woefully ignorant and dismissive of the potential of renewables, with policies riddled with contradiction,” she said. “Perhaps if its ministers spent a little more time with the country’s leading scientists and renewables experts, rather than nestled in the pockets of fossil-fuel companies, they’d be a little more enlightened.”

The pair of oil and gas giants also secured more than twice as many meetings with ministers as two of their most well-known adversaries, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, who had 67 meetings with ministers between them.

The scale of the lobbying is revealed in a database of meetings that ministers in four Whitehall departments have had with outside organisations – the ministries covering energy and climate change, the environment, business, and the treasury.

The database – compiled by the Guardian – has been drawn from official registers of meetings recorded by Whitehall from May 2010 to June 2014, the most recent declarations.

However the registers make public only uninformative descriptions of what was discussed in the meetings, stating, for instance, that they talked about “energy policy” or “business”.

After the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats formed their coalition government in May 2010, Shell was the the first company through the door to have an “introductory” meeting with Chris Huhne, the then secretary of state for climate change and energy.

During the lifetime of the government, its executives were able to promote the multinational’s interests on a range of issues ranging from climate change to tax.

In two months, July and October 2011, Shell saw ministers at least eight times . That was a year in which the company’s responsibility for oil spills in Nigeria was frequently in the news, as were the company’s interests in Iraq, Kurdistan and Libya.

BP’s meetings helped to develop, in the words of a Foreign Office diplomat, the effort to “strengthen the strategic alliance” between BP and the government on global economic and energy issues. The comment, made in documents disclosed under the freedom of information act, was made last year before an annual “high-level” dinner attended by senior diplomats and BP executives.

A BP spokesman said: ”BP is a major UK-headquartered company with significant businesses and investments in the UK as well as worldwide. We employ around 15,000 people in this country and are currently undertaking a multi-billion pound investment programme in the UK North Sea.

“As such, we have regular meetings with various Government departments who are interested in both our business and various issues involving our industry. Many of these are at the Government’s request.”

A Shell spokesman said: “Shell is a leading FTSE100 company, and as part of our perfectly legitimate corporate activity we engage regularly with many stakeholders, including government ministers and officials, on a wide range of topics related to the energy industry and Shell’s operations.”

The face-to-face meetings with ministers allow the fossil fuel industry to promote their interests. A government source who was regularly involved in the meetings with energy companies described how they vehemently objected to a windfall tax that was suddenly imposed on North Sea oil producers in 2011.

They warned that tens of thousands of jobs in the UK would be lost. “The oil companies were absolutely furious, as they hadn’t known anything about it. They said it had ruined their positions within their [multinational] companies in fighting for investment in the North Sea,” said the source.

The same source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, has been struck by the firms that want to start fracking: “I was just amazed at their sense of entitlement. They thought the government was there to ease their way, not to strike a balance with public concerns.”

Senior figures in the renewable industry said they had difficulty securing face-to-face meetings with ministers. One senior person in the renewables industry also described how ministers seemed indifferent to an overseas renewables company that was offering to invest a substantial sum in Britain. “You’d think that would be welcomed, but there was no sign of a red carpet, let alone a cup of coffee. There was an odd atmosphere and they were not really paying full attention.”

Another senior executive in the renewables industry blamed Conservative ministers in the Liberal Democrat-controlled Department of Energy and Climate Change for the difficulty in getting meetings.

“There was a huge difference with the Liberal Democrat ministers. They were accessible and supportive. We couldn’t have asked for more from them but they did not have the clout to deliver everything,” said the executive.

Michael Fallon, the energy minister in 2013 and 2014, before he was promoted to the cabinet, was identified by two renewable industry executives as being particularly unwelcoming. One said: “He refused all our meeting requests and flatly refused to engage. He kept finding excuses not to meet.”

The other said: “We found it very difficult even to get a meeting with him, even when the issues directly affected his brief as energy minister.”

Environmental campaigners said their access to ministers was diluted as they met the politicians with other campaign groups.

The database shows that more of the meetings that Shell and BP had with ministers were on their own (43 and 33 respectively) compared to Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace. Friends of the Earth had 14 meetings on their own and Greenpeace 11.

One campaigner involved in these meetings said the encounters with ministers often took the form of a question and answer session about issues that were topical. Another campaigner, Alastair Harper, a policy adviser at the Green Alliance, said the advantage of a range of environmental campaigns meeting ministers at the same time was that it allowed the campaigners to signal that they had broad support on a particular issue.

Lucas added: “This year, David Cameron dubbed climate change one of “the greatest threats” we faced. But the chasm unearthed here is sadly illustrative of a government out of touch with the vast opportunities offered by the renewables industry. If Cameron’s serious about keeping people’s energy bills down and improving energy security, he’d put his money – and meetings – where his mouth is.”

The Department for Energy and Climate Change said it would not comment while the general election was taking place.

How The Guardian calculated the number of meetings:

Every department publishes a record of ministers’ meetings with external organisations. The records are usually published every quarter. The Guardian downloaded all of these since the coalition came to power, in all 116 documents. The information was turned into a database listing every meeting and every organisation. The organisations can either meet with the minister one-on-one, or as part of a larger group.

Often, several organisations take part in the same meeting. For example, BP met ministers 79 times, Shell 112 times, but Shell and BP had 165 meetings together with the ministers. That’s because Shell was present in some of the 79 meetings that BP had, and vice versa. This affects the totals when the figures for individual organisations are added together.